After ten years of special women-only swimming hours, the mayor of Beckum introduced men-only swimming as well. He made the decision after a request was made by the chairman of the town’s Arabic association, Mustafa Shalabi.

“In our culture… the women and men don’t swim together. There they swim separately.” In the city center it’s market day. If the men want to swim together, then they should swim together and if they don’t, then they can swim mixed, I don’t see the problem,” Shalabi says in a WDR news item.

The mayor, Mayor Karl-Uwe Strothmann, thought it was a good idea to introduce another category of gender segregated swimming.

“Ultimately, the background behind all this was simply that for over ten years now, we have had women-only swimming, which has been received positively,” he says.

But mayor Strothmann backpedalled after a strong backlash. Several protest letters have been received:

“This is how isolation works, but not integration,” one reads.

According to the WDR item, “the protests have caused the men-only swimming project to be put on hold for the time being. Over the next few months, the appropriate boards will discuss what will happen next”.